News Photo by Reagan Voetberg Senior Kaden Wyman works on the wheel of a car on Wednesday night at the Career and Technical Education expo at Alpena High School.

ALPENA — Career and Technical Education (CTE) classes at Alpena High School are equipping students for the future.

Alpena High School hosted a CTE expo Wednesday night as CTE month nears its conclusion.

CTE month takes place every February and the month highlights CTE programs and their role in preparing students for their future careers.

Alpena High School offers 11 CTE programs. Those programs are agriscience, construction technology, digital media, business management, marketing, woodworking, healthcare occupations, teacher academy, welding, automotive technology, and engineering and robotics technologies.

Marleigh Hann, a senior in the teacher academy program, said she loves the hands-on experience and the opportunity to learn from a mentor teacher in a fifth grade classroom four days a week.

“I’ve learned a lot of social emotional skills,” Hann said.

She has also learned about stress management, organization, and responsibility, she said.

Hann said she plans to be an educator in the future.

“It’s definitely helped me decide what I want to do for sure,” Hann said. “I was kind of on the fence about different careers when I first started taking this class. Even during those tough times, it’s like, ‘this is what I want to do.'”

Hann said she has taken a CTE course every year of high school. She has taken the agriscience courses, business management, and one of the computer aided design (CAD) courses.

She said she likes the teacher academy program and wouldn’t change anything about it.

Katelyn Forshey is a junior in the welding program. She is also taking agroscience.

Forshey said she likes learning all the different welding positions, as well as the various types of welding, such as Gas Metal Arc Welding (MIG), Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (TIG), and flux welding.

“It helps you going forward because then you learn what you’re good at,” Forshey said. “You can learn what you want to do later on.”

Forshey said she wants to start a small business and do on-the-side welding jobs in the future.

The welding program has taught her confidence in working independently.

“If you mess something up, you learn how to fix it yourself and handle it yourself without immediately needing to have someone else come help you,” she said.

Forshey said she likes the program as it is and appreciates both the hands-on aspects and classroom time, as well as the fact that she earns a math credit for it.

Kaden Wyman is a senior in the automotive technology program. He has also taken agriscience and construction courses.

Wyman said his favorite part about the automotive program is the variety of projects he gets to work on.

“We get to see a bunch of different cars and do a bunch of different things that a lot of students and a lot of other people would not typically be able to see your work on”

He said he enjoyed learning about how everything works on the internals of a vehicle, like learning how to rebuild an engine.

Wyman has earned a certification in manual transmission through the program and he works part time at a local auto dealership.

“A lot of stuff that I learned here I use there,” he said.

Wyman said the one thing he would improve is that the class would cover a larger variety of topics. He said he feels like the class focuses in one area for a long period of time.

Over the course of the school year there are right around 700 enrollments in CTE courses, Ron Worth, CTE and work based learning coordinator, said. That figure counts just class enrollments, and is not the total number of students taking courses since some students take multiple.

About 40 to 60 students take courses each year from Alcona Community Schools, Atlanta Community Schools, and Hillman Community Schools, although Worth said there are no students from Alcona this school year.

Reagan Voetberg can be reached at 989-358-5683 or rvoetberg@TheAlpenaNews.com.